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Eric Alvarez hopped into the cab of his milk truck Thursday afternoon, flipped the ignition switch and waited a moment for the truck to warm up.

“It’s so quiet,” said Alvarez, a salesman for Morning Fresh Dairy in Bellvue.

He pulled the truck out of the milk loading area and, in near silence, slinked onto the county road toward Fort Collins.

With its tall, flat windshield and colorful exterior, the Colorado-built truck looks a bit unusual sitting next to the dairy’s older gasoline and diesel delivery trucks.

The biggest difference is under the hood: Alvarez’s truck is Morning Fresh’s first electric delivery truck — likely the first of many that could eventually replace the dairy’s entire fleet of fossil fuel-powered vehicles.

The truck is the result of a partnership between Morning Fresh and Lafayette-based Boulder Electric Vehicle, which designs and builds sustainable delivery trucks and estimates the vehicles can pay for themselves within three years and save $100,000 per vehicle over 10 years.

“Just with the price of gas and trying to stay in being a green company, it’s with our beliefs and what we want to do,” said Morning Fresh co-owner Lori Graves. “We do a lot of driving, and that does put a lot of pollution in the air. We’re trying to be as efficient as we can.”

The goal is to build and buy enough electric trucks for all of the diary’s 13 home delivery routes, each of which averages about 110 miles, she said.

Eventually, the dairy will install a photovoltaic solar power generation system to power the trucks, reducing carbon emissions even further, Graves said.

“This is one step toward our goal of being sustainable and off the grid,” she said.

The new electric truck takes about five hours to recharge, and it can drive about 120 miles between charges, Graves said, making it ideal for use in the Fort Collins and Loveland areas, but more difficult to use on the dairy’s more far-flung routes.

The conversion of the dairy’s fleet to electric vehicles will be an ongoing process because delivery routes to Greeley and Ault will require charging stations to be placed in those areas.

“As the climate of society evolves to where there’s more charging stations available, we’ll be able to have more trucks,” Graves said.

For now, the electric truck runs only on Alvarez’s sales runs, but the dairy will put it on a delivery route soon.

“People are pretty excited” when they see the electric truck, said Alvarez while on a brief trial delivery run Thursday in Fort Collins.

“And, this thing is kind of fun to drive as well,” he said. “It’s different. Very different.”